Angry citizens

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Angry citizens is a media catchphrase that emerged in Germany as a neologism in 2010. The previously rarely used term was coined by the essay Der Wutbürger by journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit in the news magazine Der Spiegel in issue 41/2010. In it he was described as a member of a bourgeois milieu who "broke with bourgeois tradition" and gave up politics. The group of people he describes is primarily an older and wealthy conservative group of people who oppose arbitrary political decisions with “ anger ” and “ indignation ” and who are characterized by a persistent will to protest . Both the essay and the catchphrase were received critically in the media and Wutbürger was voted German “ Word of the Year ” 2010, followed by terms such as Stuttgart 21 , Sarrazin-Gen , Cyberwar , WikiLeaks or Schottern , some of which are thematically related. The term Wutbürger was included in the Duden dictionary , which defines it as "newspaper jargon" for a "citizen who protests and demonstrates very violently out of disappointment about certain political decisions".

Use of terms

In his Spiegel article from October 11, 2010, Dirk Kurbjuweit defined the “angry citizen” with reference to the debates about Thilo Sarrazin and the Stuttgart 21 station project as a wealthy, conservative person who was “no longer young”, relaxed and earlier "State support", but now "deeply indignant about the politicians". He breaks “with the bourgeois tradition that the political center also includes an inner center”, such as serenity. The behavior of the angry citizen is a defense against change, he should not be a world citizen . Kurbjuweit sees “parallels” in both debates, despite thematic differences, as it is always about “forgetting about the future”. Both protests are "an expression of a skeptical center that wants to preserve what it has and knows at the expense of a good future for the country".

Rally against Stuttgart 21 , August 13, 2010

Kurbjuweit referred to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on a reading of Sarrazin's in Munich, in which the reaction to critics of Sarrazin's theses was described with sentences such as: “The dignified Munich bourgeoisie was terribly wrong” - “There was hissing, booing and loud interfered ”-“ In the Munich riding arena there was a touch of the sports palace . Well-dressed gray heads not only got excited, they drooled. ”Kurbjuweit compared these events with the protests against Stuttgart 21, which were also borne by the bourgeoisie,“ including CDU voters and pensioners. ”They too drove“ naked anger, they too roared and hate. "A well-understood bourgeoisie is characterized by" composure in the face of difficulties ". Zeal towards other people, ethnic groups, ethnic groups, religions "is unseemly behavior, is indecent", which would also be dictated by "the principle of human equality and the feeling of humanity". He recognized the events he cited as “harbingers of demographically changed society” and stated that “whoever is old is also more afraid, afraid of the new, the strange”. The existing should remain because it is familiar and can be mastered without learning. The “fearful citizen” would therefore “easily become an angry citizen who turns against everyone who lives differently, looks different, believes differently”.

The term Wutbürger can in some media since 2007 to refer to members of the right-wing populist electoral association citizens in anger show since 2014 for Pegida or some members of the AFD : This assessment agreed AFD co-founder Bernd Lucke to.

reception

Some media ascribed negative characteristics to the so-called “angry citizen”, for example “ unruly ”, “selfish” and “ bourgeois ”. The re-coining of the term was well received in an article by Hannes Nussbaumer that was published on October 15, 2010 in the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger . Nussbaumer explicitly writes in it that the term “Wutbürger” was created by “Spiegel”. Nussbaumer also states that the angry citizen is primarily “worried about his own world” such as his job, his family, etc., while his identification with the state and society is rather low. Politically, however, he does not automatically stand on the right, but has "no strong ideological or party-political ties".

Adam Soboczynski, on the other hand, in a review of the book The Coming Uprising at the time, described the angry citizen as reactionary , not conservative, because "he is secretly shaped by an ardent distrust of parliamentarism and democratic institutions that structure participation ". One does not want to “get involved in the lower parts of the parties, but shorten the opinion-forming process in referendums ” and one no longer wants a government “that relies on discreet communication, but celebrates WikiLeaks ”. Minorities such as migrants and smokers are supposed to be curbed by citizen surveys "as long as the state still protects them unnecessarily". Mathias Greffrath summed up in his column Das Schlagloch in der taz that Soboczynski himself remained formalistic in his defense of the “formalistic aspects of democracy”: “The 15-year history of anger interests him just as little as its background of economic upheaval and political erosion. “That is a shame, because“ only when the criticism of anger is combined with one of the deterioration of political institutions ”would it become“ a shoe off ”.

The social psychologist Harald Welzer called the term in the taz with regard to the protests against Stuttgart 21 "formulated in a denunciative way". The protest movement is heterogeneous, "from the pensioner to the student". It is not at all clear “what social visions and ideas they have in detail”. Rather, what is hidden behind it is “a reflection on what has become of the forms of communication in our parliamentarism and our society ”. Matthias Horx warned against lumping the protests against Stuttgart 21 with the Sarrazin debate. With Sarrazin "rather the old, dull instincts would be served, which will probably always find a certain clientele in this country", while he sees the demonstrations spanning generations. They are more of a "very mixed protest, indicating that culture of indignation is not the exception today, but the rule". Gangolf Stocker , spokesman for the action alliance against Stuttgart 21, criticized the word creation as “silly”: “The people who demonstrate against Stuttgart 21 are not just angry , they go for something, for the alternative terminus 21 , and for more grassroots democracy on the street."

In an essay entitled The Courageous Citizens, Barbara Supp replied in Der Spiegel to Kurbjuweit's theses. "No egoists" demonstrated, but people with a sense of citizenship. It is a “blessing for democracy” and the phenomenon is not new: a hundred years ago there was the “cultural model of peaceful street demonstrations” as in the “fight against three-class suffrage in Prussia”. In the current crisis of representative democracy only "early citizen participation, referendums" help. What has changed is that "the middle of society is more suspicious of how their governments govern" and that they want to be informed "about the causes, risks and side effects of decisions" because "they do not trust the political language formulas". That is the knowledge that would spread from Stuttgart.

The philosopher Ralf Konersmann warned in a contribution to the debate that “anger and resentment” about 'those up there' cannot replace political judgment: In the “angry bourgeois worldview” there is a clear hierarchy between those above and the “righteous down here, who are not Knowing power, but morals on their side. ”He described the“ new, post-critical anger ”as“ fanaticism of the saturated ”. She was "opinionated, stubborn, self-righteous, hysterical". Viewed as a cultural phenomenon, “the new renitenz” is instructive. The French publicist Stéphane Hessel reacted “to the mental shifts that can be observed in this and similar way across Western Europe”. Hessel speaks of outrage, and this ' indignation ' is “something completely different from the restlessness of the angry citizens”: The most important difference is that “the outrage does not have to be staged as personal concern. It is free, it is egalitarian, it remains open to political judgment and chooses its own occasions. While the anger always revolves around the person who gives himself up to it, the indignation remains tied to the matter itself and has nothing to fear - be it because the lethargy. Outrage, and not anger, is the legitimate heir to criticism. "

Political scientist Franz Walter said on the occasion of a study by the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research on the composition, attitude patterns and orientations of members of various protest groups that the term angry bourgeoisie is difficult to define "because its forms of action and demands are difficult to understand". There are “on the one hand initiatives such as the opposition to Stuttgart 21, which became the engine for the election success of the Greens”, and then again campaigns against wind power plants “which tend to contradict the core demands of the green opponents of nuclear power”. The only thing in common is that 70 percent of all people involved in the studies are over the age of 45 and the proportion of university graduates is between 50 and 60 percent. Opponents of Berlin Brandenburg Airport and the high-voltage lines are also more than 90 percent satisfied with their material living conditions.

Bernd Lucke , co-founder of Alternative für Deutschland , had a negative connotation when he left the AfD: “I realized too late ... the extent to which members were pushing into the party who wanted to transform the AfD into a protest and angry citizens' party. "

In an interview with Deutschlandfunk, the sociologist Heinz Bude suggested replacing the term angry citizens with hateful citizens ; he was to be assigned to the “bitterness”. Bude's suggestion was accepted by journalists with approval. Critics see in this the inadmissible attempt by the elites to pathologize and stigmatize those citizens whose views differ from the spectrum of opinion considered permissible by the political-media mainstream as mentally ill people who are in need of psychological and medicinal therapy ( bitterness ), with whose opinions one can but does not want to deal seriously with the content.

"Word of the year" and suggestion for "Unword of the year"

The Society for German Language (GfdS) justified the choice of “ Word of the Year 2010” with the fact that the new formation was used “by numerous newspapers and television stations” “to express an outrage in the population that political decisions were made about their Being hit head off ”. The word documents “a great need of the citizens to have a say in socially and politically relevant projects beyond their voting decision ”.

Horst Dieter Schlosser , Germanist and member of the Society for German Language and initiator of the language-critical campaign “ Unwort des Jahres ”, described the term angry citizen as “defamatory”; This implies that the motive of his action was nothing more than anger, what the commitment abwerte the citizen. After all, citizens act carefully when they stand up for their rights and not out of blind anger. According to Jassien Kelm in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , he had proposed the term as the bad word of the year “angry” about the election of the word of the year .

Switzerland: cartoon of the year 2016

The cartoon inner workings of an angry citizen of Marco Ratschiller was elected in 2016 to a caricature of the year. The graphic thematizes, among other things, the proximity to conspiracy theories and was chosen by the visitors of the annual exhibition "Drawn" in the Museum for Communication in Bern .

2018 Pegida demonstration Dresden and the "hat citizens"

On August 16, 2018, there was an incident in Dresden between the police and a team of reporters from Frontal 21 of the ZDF broadcaster . After two Pegida demonstrators wrongly filed a criminal complaint against a cameraman of the broadcaster for violating personal rights and insulting them, the journalists were checked by the police for at least 45 minutes and their activities were hindered as a result. In reference to the man's headgear in the video, a fishing hat in the German national colors , as well as Pegida's self-description as a “concerned citizen”, the portemanteau “Hatbürger” was created on social media . The term then established itself and is used in many media , for example in the context of Maik G's claim for compensation against ZDF, which became known on June 14, 2019, with the help of his lawyer, the Saxon AfD vice-president Maximilian Krah .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Dirk Kurbjuweit: The angry citizen . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 2010, p. 26-27 ( online ).
  2. ↑ Wort und Unwort des Jahres in Deutschland , duden.de, accessed on October 2, 2011
  3. ^ Word of the year 2010: Wutbürger ( Memento from December 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Ulrike Stölzel on duden.de from December 17, 2010, accessed on October 3, 2011
  4. ↑ Wutbürger in duden.de, accessed on September 30, 2011
  5. ^ Therapist and arsonist , September 30, 2010
  6. ↑ Every vote counts , taz of November 20, 2007.
  7. ^ Citizens in anger , Zeit Online from July 6, 2008.
  8. ^ Benno Schirrmeister: Westentaschen-Schill from the Weser . In: taz.de . July 8, 2008. Retrieved on October 25, 2010: "On the list position two of the angry citizens is [...]"
  9. ↑ Querulanten, Glücksritter, Vereinsmeier , Florian Hartleb in Tagesspiegel.de, accessed on July 28, 2015
  10. ↑ Nadine Lindner, Norbert Seitz: Wutbürger gegen das System , Deutschlandfunk, December 21, 2014
  11. ↑ a b No figurehead for angry citizens: party founder Lucke leaves AfD , n-tv.de
  12. ↑ a b The stubbornness of the angry citizens , Ralf Konersmann in the Hamburger Abendblatt from March 31, 2011, here ( Memento from August 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ a b Old, Stubborn, Selfish , Spiegel Online from September 8, 2011
  14. ↑ Video today: Study - Angry citizens are also egoists (September 13, 2011, sociological study Göttingen)  in the ZDFmediathek , accessed on February 11, 2014. (offline)
  15. ↑ a b Hannes Nussbaumer: Whoever votes has a valve . In: Tages-Anzeiger . October 15, 2010. Retrieved October 25, 2010.
  16. ↑ We Antidemocrats , Zeit Online from December 2, 2010.
  17. ↑ citizens dreams on Patio Heater , taz of 7 December of 2010.
  18. ↑ "The future will be very fragmented" , taz of October 23, 2010.
  19. ↑ Anna Reimann: Revolt of the silver heads . In Spiegel Online on October 17, 2010.
  20. ^ "Wutbürger" is the word of the year , Zeit Online from December 17, 2010.
  21. ↑ Barbara Supp : The courageous citizens . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 2010, p. 42-43 ( Online - Oct. 18, 2010 ).
  22. ^ New studies on protests , Institute for Democracy Research at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen from September 8, 2011
  23. ↑ [1] "Hate has become socially acceptable". Interview with Deutschlandfunk on October 14, 2015
  24. ↑ Harry Nutt: "Milieu der Bitterten", in: Berliner Zeitung (print edition) of October 16, 2015. p. 4.
  25. ↑ [2] "The Unmasking of Dr-Ing" in: "Der Freitag" from October 14, 2015
  26. ^ Press release ( memento of September 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) of the Society for German Language of December 17, 2010.
  27. ^ The angry citizen who doesn't want to be , sueddeutsche.de of December 29, 2010.
  28. ^ "Wutbürger" wins caricature award , SRF, January 24, 2017
  29. ↑ What are you actually afraid of? Retrieved July 27, 2020 .
  30. ↑ AfD vice represents Maik G. "Hutbürger" wants compensation from ZDF
  31. ↑ Pegida "Hutbürger" demands compensation from ZDF - with AfD lawyer , Berliner Morgenpost June 14, 2019
  32. ↑ At least 20,000 euros "Hutbürger" wants compensation from ZDF , picture Dresden June 14, 2019
  33. ↑ "They filmed me in the face" "Hatbürger" wants compensation Der Tagesspiegel June 14, 2019